Abstract

This paper will, in its successive steps and movements, revolve around one single question, a question that might, at first sight, come across as somewhat irrelevant or even impertinent within the context of philosophical or academic discourse. How romantic is Jean-Luc Nancy? Or: is there a specifically Nancyan sense of romance? Notwithstanding these somewhat unscholarly formulations, I am increasingly convinced that the question of love, or indeed more specifically of romance, is the most intimate inspiration of Nancy’s work, the key unlocking all other keys. The theme of love has always played an important role in his work, from the early essay “Shattered Love” (“L’amour en éclats,” 1986) to his later works on the body and pleasure. In this paper, I will touch upon a number of these texts, but I will more particularly refer to two of Nancy’s more recent works, the yet untranslated book Sexistence from 2017 and Expectation: Philosophy, Literature (2018, published in French in 2015 as Demande: Littérature et philosophie). The question of romance, that is, the question of passionate interaction, of intrigue, of writing, of dramatization. This quite heterogeneous web of associations already implies a number of age-old philosophical issues: the relation between love and thinking; the relation between love and literature; and, subsequently, between philosophy and literature; the issue of the relation itself. The knot uniting these issues under the single heading of “romance” has been most firmly tied about two centuries ago, in the late eighteenth-century movement of early German, i.e., Jena, Romanticism, that significant moment in intellectual history where the barriers between philosophy and literature were broken down and where, quite generally put, the sense of the world was conceived of as a matter of romanticization. Although Nancy himself would be reluctant to call himself a Romantic philosopher in this historical sense of the word, this is exactly what I want to argue here: I want to show that Nancy’s philosophy of love – and by extension his philosophical thinking tout court – should be placed in the tradition of German Romanticism, rather than in that of, for instance, phenomenology, ontology, or philosophy proper. This claim is massive in its depth and scope and can impossibly be explored here in an exhaustive way. Instead, I will flesh out this perspective by advancing four successive hypotheses that enable to mark the contours of what I call Nancy’s romanticism. With this exploration, I hope to do three things at once: firstly, to underscore what I take to be the core or pulse of Nancy’s thinking: the issue of romance; secondly, to investigate to what extent this romantic pulse might be traced back to the Romantic tradition; and, thirdly, to emphasize why Nancy’s romantic thinking is relevant for us today.

摘要

这篇论文将在其连续的步骤和动作中围绕一个问题展开，这个问题乍一看可能在哲学或学术话语的背景下显得有些无关紧要，甚至显得有些无礼。让-吕克·南希有多浪漫？或者：有没有一种特别的南青浪漫感？尽管有这些有些不科学的表述，我越来越相信爱情的问题，或者更确切地说是浪漫的问题，是南希作品最贴心的灵感，解锁所有其他钥匙的钥匙。从早期的散文“破碎的爱”（“L'amour en éclats”，1986 年）到他后来关于身体和快乐的作品，爱的主题一直在他的作品中扮演着重要的角色。在本文中，我将涉及其中的一些文本，但我将更特别地提及 Nancy 的两部近期作品，即2017 年尚未翻译的《性别存在》和《期待：哲学、文学》（2018 年，2015 年以法语出版）需求：文学与哲学）。浪漫的问题，也就是激情互动、阴谋、写作、戏剧化的问题。这个异类的联想网络已经暗示了许多古老的哲学问题：爱与思考之间的关系；爱情与文学的关系；随后，在哲学和文学之间；关系本身的问题。将这些问题统一在“浪漫”这一单一标题下的纽带，在大约两个世纪前，在 18 世纪晚期德国早期的运动，即耶拿，浪漫主义中最为牢固地联系在一起，在思想史上的重要时刻，哲学和文学被分解了，一般来说，世界的意义被认为是浪漫化的问题. 尽管南希本人不愿意在这个词的历史意义上称自己为浪漫主义哲学家，但这正是我想在这里论证的：我想展示南希的爱情哲学——以及他的哲学思想在法庭上的推广– 应该放在德国浪漫主义的传统中，而不是放在诸如现象学、本体论或哲学本身的传统中。这一主张在深度和范围上都是巨大的，在这里不可能以详尽的方式进行探讨。相反，我将通过提出四个连续的假设来充实这个观点，这些假设能够标记我称之为南希浪漫主义的轮廓。通过这次探索，我希望同时做三件事：第一，强调我认为是南希思想的核心或脉搏：浪漫问题；其次，探究这种浪漫的脉搏在多大程度上可以追溯到浪漫主义传统；第三，强调为什么南希的浪漫思想与今天的我们息息相关。